Oprah Winfrey
If Oprah Winfrey were a top
government official--and a fair bit of America probably wishes she were--she
would be Alan Greenspan. When Greenspan speaks, he roils financial markets.
When Oprah speaks, she roils--well, everything else. Consider the trial she is
now enduring in Amarillo, Texas: Cattlemen claim that, upon learning the
dangers of mad-cow disease, Oprah uttered a single on-air sentence--"It has
just stopped me cold from eating another burger!"--that punctured America's
irrational exuberance for beef. Beef prices reeled, and cattlemen lost millions
of dollars. (Oprah's lawyers claim that the beef swoon was the product of
droughts and high feed prices.)
Perhaps
book publishers should foot her legal bills in the beef trial: Each time Oprah
selects a new novel for "Oprah's Book Club," a publisher blesses her name. A
word from Oprah, and a novel sells 1 million copies rather than 100,000. On
Jan. 16, Oprah picked Toni Morrison's Paradise for the club. The novel
shot to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, just as several
club selections before it had. Three previous picks remain on the
paperback-best-seller list. When Oprah went fitness crazy, books by her chef
and her personal trainer became nationwide hits. Marketing experts now
routinely refer to the "Oprah Effect."
The effect is felt not only by blessed merchandise but also
by the star herself. Oprah has owned the No. 1 talk show in the country for
more than 10 years. Her movie debut in The Color Purple netted her an
Oscar nomination. She's the highest-paid entertainer in the world, worth well
over $400 million. And she's thinner than you.
But of
course, she is a daytime-talk-show host, and it's conventional wisdom that
daytime talk shows are deplorable. The shows parade freaks in front of the
viewing public. Ricki Lake and Jerry Springer have hiked their ratings by
showcasing increasingly repulsive molesters, abusers, adulterers, and
pederasts, all of them eager to tell the world about their loathsomeness. Talk
shows are the zenith of America's nauseating confessional culture.
Among those righteous folk who don't watch the
shows, Oprah is lumped with the garbage. But she doesn't belong. Two years ago,
Oprah stopped booking freak guests. It was a huge ratings risk, but her
audience stuck with her. Springer has resorted to hawking Too Hot for TV
videotapes featuring awkward nudity and grim violence-- Oprah , sans
freaks, continues to win handily in the ratings.
Oprah is Oprah and, according to critics, this is the problem. She is
indeed the leading practitioner of confessional television. When she lost
weight, she rolled a representative wagon of pig fat onstage. She routinely
breaks down in tears, and she never hesitates to let us know when things go
wrong with Stedman, her longtime beau.
So what redeems Oprah? How does her confessional television
differ from Phil Donahue's and Springer's? Oprah is the confessor, that's how.
The Donahues and Springers of the world remain aloof, above and separate from
guests. Their guests confess, the hosts oppress, and the audience laughs its
head off. The host and audience are judge and jury for the miserable, benighted
guests. It's the zoo theory of television: Let's make fun of these stupid
animals.
But Oprah
doesn't condescend to guests. She couldn't possibly: When her show featured
victims of sexual abuse, Oprah revealed that she'd been abused, too. When she
talked to cocaine addicts, she admitted to having tried the drug herself.
Imagine Donahue revealing his drug habit or his scarred emotions ("Is the
caller there? We're talking about my junkie days"). Oprah is one of the very
few celebrities who owes her fame not to her superhuman qualities (beauty,
athletic ability, etc.) but to her human frailties. Oprah has said, "One of my
greatest assets is knowing I'm no different from the viewer." For female fans,
Oprah is a girlfriend.
Oprah is also one of the very few celebrities
who hasn't forgotten where she came from. She identifies with underdogs because
she was the underest-dog of them all. She came from less than nowhere: In 1954,
she was born illegitimate, poor, female, and black in Jim Crow Mississippi.
Several male family members sexually abused her. Overcoming these obstacles has
lent her street cred with guests and fans. They make her success always
astonishing and rarely begrudged.
Oprah lends her fame and
fortune to the right causes. She mentors girls from the Chicago projects and
endows scholarships to Morehouse College and Tennessee State University. Some
black female celebs (Dionne Warwick) shill for phone-psychic scams that exploit
poor black women. Oprah? She started a book club. (Her taste, incidentally, has
been impeccable: No John Grisham or John Gray; lots of interesting,
underpublicized novels. Alfred Kazin jowled that Oprah's club represents the
"carpet bombing of the American mind," but even a stuffed shirt like Kazin
can't complain when 15 million TV watchers are urged to read Toni Morrison and
do.)
Despite the ban on cameras
in the courtroom, Oprah's beef trial is starting to resemble an episode on her
show. Last week, a witness collapsed in tears while apologizing to the
ranchers. My hunch is that Oprah will win over even the cattlemen, eventually.
During the trial, Oprah is recording her show in Amarillo, a town supposedly
devastated by her beef-bashing. Locals have been lining up for tickets.
